


Caught, Cleansed, Cauterized

by bigasswritingmagnet (thekumquat)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Accidental Therapy, Hawke doesn't die in the fade because I won't let her, Mentions of Canonical Character Deaths, Mild Gore, Psychological Torture, but downplayed kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-05 19:42:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19047085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekumquat/pseuds/bigasswritingmagnet
Summary: The Nightmare forces Hawke to live her worst moments over and over again. It shows her how useless she is, how she failed everyone around her, how nothing she did ever mattered.





	Caught, Cleansed, Cauterized

Hawke cradled her mother in her arms. The world was too sharp and too bright, every detail burning into her mind. The cold from the foundry floor leaching into her skin where bare knees met stone. The stench of rot and fresh blood searing the back of her throat. Her mother's eyes, the wrong color, clouded and grey, holding no love for her eldest. 

"Where were you?" she rasped, the necklace of stitches tugging with every breath. "Why didn't you come for me?" 

"I  _ did _ ," Hawke wept, as she did every time. "I did, I  _ tried--"  _

_ "I waited,"  _ Leandra said, as if Hawke hadn't spoken. "I waited for you to find me." 

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm--" 

Leandra's face went slack and her body still. The foundry faded, and Hawke was alone in darkness once again. She pressed her forehead to her knees and hugged herself tightly, trying to find some solace in what she knew would be the briefest of respites. 

Every time she thought she had gone numb, every time she thought she had learned to resist the Nightmare's torments, it found whatever place in her mind she was hiding, and dragged her out again. 

"Sister, get up!" Carver shouted. "What are you doing? We have to fight!" 

Hawke lurched to her feet in time to send a charging darkspawn flying backwards. If she could get to Bethany, she could save her. But she couldn't get to Bethany. Every step she took, another dozen darkspawn would appear in front of her, and no matter how hard she struck, no matter how wide she cast her spells, it was never enough. 

The ground shook beneath her feet. Great, twisting horns rose from behind the crest of the hill, and Hawke despaired. Her staff slipped from her fingers, but the darkspawn didn't cut her down. That was not their purpose here. 

The ogre wrapped one huge hand around Bethany's waist and wrenched her from the ground. Once, twice it slammed her against the ground. Crack of bone. Soft gasp of her sister's last breath. A corpse tumbling to the ground, limbs splayed like a forgotten doll's.  

It never mattered what she did. She could never make it in time. She tried, every time, but nothing she did mattered. There was no way for her to stop the ogre. 

Hawke could never have stopped the ogre. 

Nothing she did mattered. 

The explosion nearly knocked her off her feet, the blaze of light making her throw up a hand to shield her eyes. Anders stood on the steps, his face almost skeletal in the harsh light of the burning city.  

"You could have stopped me," he said, simply, sadly, exhaustion in every line of his frame. "If you'd payed attention, you could have talked me down from this. Why don't you ever listen?"  

"I could have stopped you," Hawke repeated. "But nothing I did mattered. Nothing I ever did mattered." 

Anders looked briefly puzzled. 

"You were selfish," he pressed, "too busy with your own problems to really help us. You never cared about this city." 

But Hawke wasn't listening. 

"Nothing I did ever mattered,” she whispered, more thoughtful than agonized. “but I could have stopped you." 

Hawke was in the foundry again, holding her mother. There had been so much going on, so many things to fret and worry over, qunari and templars and what was one more murderer in a city that chewed itself up like a mad rat even on a good day?  _ Maybe  _ if she’d pressed Gaspard harder,  _ maybe  _ if she’d looked into it more,  _ maybe  _ if she’d paid more attention to Anders, maybe, maybe,  _ maybe. _

“Where were you?” her mother demanded, but Hawke didn’t hear her. She’d gone through all of this over and over and over again, and no matter what she did, the outcome never changed. And sure, the Nightmare was making sure she couldn’t but...

"But I didn't  _ try  _ to stop you," Hawke said, dropping her startled mother to the ground and standing. "If I had tried, would I have succeeded? Nothing I ever did mattered; does that include the things I didn't try to do?"

Hawke stared down at the lyrium idol in her hand, felt its sibilant hum in her bones.

"If I nothing I did mattered, that means I would have failed no matter what I did. But if I would have failed anyway, then I  _ couldn't  _ have stopped you." 

She watched the blight creep up the veins in Carver's neck, black tendrils crawling under his skin. The Nightmare was moving faster than it usually did. Normally it liked to linger, to force her to wallow in the results of her failure. Now it was shuttling through the horrors so quickly Hawke could barely keep up, making it hard for her to follow her train of thought. 

But not hard enough. 

"You could have saved me," Carver said. "You did this. You did this." 

"No," Hawke said. He twisted, shifted, became Bethany, dripping blood from her mouth and eyes and nose. 

"You could have saved me." 

" _ No."  _ The word echoed in the darkness, and Bethany broke apart like a reflection in a rippling pond. Hawke was again standing in the burning rubble of what had once been Kirkwall's chantry. The heat of the fire made her skin feel tight and raw, but she barely noticed. 

Nothing she did mattered...except for the things she blamed on herself. 

Hawke turned her back on Anders and descended the steps to the Chantry square, and kept going. The landscape scrambled to keep up, streets and buildings erupting around her. 

"If nothing I do matters, why should it matter to me? If I'm such a failure, everything would have turned out this way anyway. Why should I be to blame for something I couldn't have stopped?" 

Her friends stood in the next courtyard, their faces twisted in hate and disgust. 

"You ruined  _ everything _ ," Merrill hissed, words dripping venom. Hawke sidestepped her and kept going. 

"But nothing I did mattered. How can I be the one who ruined everything if it would have been ruined no matter what I did? Either I'm to blame for everything, or it all would have fallen apart no matter what I did. It can't be  _ both,  _ can it?" 

The Arishok loomed in front of her. 

"You could have stopped this," he said. Hawke walked straight through him. 

"Could I have? I won't deny that I had a hand in some of the worst things. I released Corypheus. My actions brought the red lyrium to the surface. I helped Anders destroy the Chantry."

_ "Everyone has a story they tell themselves to justify what they've done. In the end, you are always alone with your actions."  _

Her own voice boomed through the streets, rattling in her skull. When she’d said that to the Inquisitor, she’d believed it, fully. Now, though...

"With your  _ actions _ ," she repeated. "Not the  _ results _ , our  _ actions _ . I've spent the last four years trying to fix things. Those are actions, aren't they?"

The walls of Kirkwall fell away, and became the scorched, twisted scrub of the Kokari Wilds. Darkspawn lined the path, hissing and clawing at her, but her eyes were fixed on the horizon and their hands passed through her like smoke.   

"I wasn't  _ trying  _ to help Corypheus. I didn't  _ make  _ Bartrand betray us, or sell the idol to Meredith. I didn't drive Meredith mad; I didn't give her the sword. I didn't tell Anders to do what he did. I didn't know what he had planned." 

The wilds fell away, and Hawke found herself in darkness so complete, she couldn't tell if her eyes were open or closed. She stretched out a hand, warily, and felt her fingers brush rough fabric. Before her stood a crowd of people, bruised and bloody and bloated with the corpulence of death, some half-rotted away, some so fresh only a grey pallor betrayed them. Most of them she didn't know, but she recognized enough faces to realize what she was looking at. The Nightmare was showing her every death she had ever caused. Directly or indirectly, they had died, and they were here.

"Little Hawke," the Nightmare taunted in the oozing voice she had come to know so well. "You attempt to delude yourself, as guilty men always do. You see for yourself the results of your actions. You know who is to blame." 

The air was thick with the stench of death, blood and decay and worse, but she’d seen it all before. The Nightmare was repeating itself.

"I was willing to die to stop you. That matters. I tried to find a way to get rid of the red lyrium;  _ that  _ matters.” Hawke squared her shoulders, gritted her teeth, and shoved her way through the crowd. 

“I came back to help the Inquisition fight Corypheus;  _ that  _ matters. I stood up to Meredith, I fought the Arishok, I made a deal with the Witch of the Wilds to keep my family safe--” 

Hawke knocked her shoulder against Merethari’s, half thinking  _ I didn’t even  _ like  _ you. _

“Either none of it matters, or it all matters! I am, in part,  _ responsible _ for all of this. But I am not  _ at fault _ ." 

"There is no difference," the Nightmare snapped and  _ aha _ , Hawke thought, there was a trace of irritation in its voice. She was getting to it. 

Hawke was faced with Bethany again, but barely glanced at her sister's face before shoving past. 

"Of course there is! You can't put all the blame on  _ me. I  _ can't blame it all on me either! Other people make choices. I can't control what they do. I can only control what  _ I  _ do, and all I have ever done is the best I can."  

She was moving faster now, the bodies fewer and fewer, and growing more insubstantial. The Nightmare was straining to keep up. 

"I am not  _ straining!  _ I am the embodiment of all that men fear!" 

The bodies were gone. A stone wall rose before her, so high she couldn't see the top, so wide it stretched beyond the invisible horizon. 

"I don't know why I bloody listened to you in the first place,” Hawke said, looking up at the wall. “You're a demon. Just because you're telling me what I'm afraid of is right, doesn't mean you  _ are.  _ What do  _ you  _ know about  _ fault _ , anyway?”

She slammed her palms and her power against the wall, blowing open a hole as easily as if it were made of paper. As soon as she was through, the wall collapsed behind her. 

“You're a parasite, feeding on fear-- fear you don't even make! You just sit back and let the darkspawn and the templars and everything else do all the real work. People need to already be afraid, or you can't do anything!" 

"Silence!" the Nightmare roared, the power of it shaking her bones and nearly driving her to her knees. But she grinned like a wolf, teeth and triumph bared. The Nightmare’s frustration tasted sweet on her tongue, and she let loose the vitriol the demon deserved.  

"You coward! You pathetic little thing! Was being Compassion just too  _ hard?"  _ She dug her fingers into the darkness and it broke away like rotten wood. "It's so  _ difficult  _ to help people. It takes so much  _ work _ , and it never ends, it's never enough! I had every person in Kirkwall come to me with their problems. It was  _ exhausting.  _ Sometimes I wanted to tell everyone to fuck off and deal with it themselves, but I didn't! And do you know why?" 

The Nightmare did not answer. Hawke ripped away another chunk of darkness, and found a small crack, shining with bright white light. With renewed vigor, she tore at it, a starving animal at the belly of a beast. 

"Because  _ I  _ don't give up! Because I do what needs to be done, no matter the cost! Because I don't run from my mistakes, I  _ fix them!"  _

The darkness around her cracked, crumbled, fell away. Hawke was in the Fade once more, in the Nightmare's valley, where the Inquisitor and Alistair had left her. Where she had left herself. There was no sign of the mountainous, many-eyed monster that had dragged her into itself.

Before her cowered the Nightmare's true form: a humanoid figure made of wispy white light. Just a spirit. A wraith. 

"I am fear," it said. 

"Yes," Hawke said, lip curled in contempt. She wrapped her hand around what passed for a neck, and drew the Nightmare towards her, until they were face to face. "And I am not afraid." 

Lightning burst through her fingertips, cascading through the Nightmare. It screamed and writhed and, with one last terrified howl, crumbled to ash in her grip.

Hawke stared at her empty hand. 

Perhaps this was a new trick. The Nightmare let her think she'd won, then just when she was on the verge of escape, the illusion would crumble. 

If that  _ was  _ the plan, it was very poorly thought out, because Hawke's epiphany seemed as true as it had before. She believed every word she'd said. 

No, this was no trick. She had stood in the Nightmare's own realm and  _ talked her way out _ . What a very  _ Varric  _ thing for her to have done. The thought made her smile. It felt strange. How long had it been since she'd last smiled, really truly smiled, without exhaustion or worry making it hurt? She used to smile all the time. She used to tell jokes. She used to be  _ fun.  _

Hawke resolved to try and smile more often. She’d forgotten how nice it felt to be happy. 

"Not that it hasn't been fun," she told the Fade at large, "but I really must be going." 

The Inquisitor had closed the rift at the top of the stairs, but Hawke trudged up them anyway. When she reached the top, she held out both hands, palms forward, and wiggled her fingers experimentally. Yes, she had a feel for the Fade now. She could sense the push and pull of it, the way it was woven together. The Inquisitor had sealed the rift, but it had left behind a seam. Hawke wiggled her fingers again, and slid tendrils of magic in between the stitches. She tugged, and felt it give. Excellent. 

A little wisp floated by and bumped against her hand, curiously. It was the same shade of silvery-white that the Nightmare had been. Hawke wondered if this was what was left of it. She wondered if it remembered her. 

"Shoo," she told it, waving her hand gently at it. "You won't like this next bit." 

As slow and directionless as a dandelion fluff, the wisp floated away and out of sight. Perhaps it would gather strength and the Nightmare would return anew. Or it might return as Compassion. Maybe it would become a completely different kind of spirit. She liked that idea. A second chance for everyone. 

Hawke tore open the fabric of the fade with one vicious pull, unraveling the Inquisitor's work. She resolved not to feel  _ too  _ badly about it. It wasn't exactly  _ hard  _ to close a rift. All the Inquisitor had to do was wave a hand. 

Hawke stared into the swirling green portal. On the other side, she could see the courtyard of Adamant Fortress, and Inquisition soldiers scrambling to arm themselves.

_ Won't Varric be surprised,  _ Hawke thought, and this time she laughed, the sound echoing in the empty space where the Nightmare had once been. Her heart lighter than it had been in over a decade, Hawke stepped through the rift, and went home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to thehumantrampoline for betaing, check her out on tumblr!


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